How To Improve As Subtlety Rogue — Shadowlands 9.0.2

Since all of Subtlety's damage is tied to resources, it is important to waste as little of them as possible. You should make sure you do not find yourself being Energy capped or casting Combo Point generating abilities when at maximum Combo Points.

Pooling Energy has been a vital part of optimal Subtlety gameplay for a long time now. Often players tend to go into Shadow Dance without enough Energy which makes them unable to get the maximum amount of globals in the short burst window. Since Subtlety revolves around these burst windows, you want to make sure you get most out of them.

You should aim to have at least 60 Energy and use Symbols of Death instantly to get close to the Energy cap when going into Shadow Dance burst windows.

On single-target, you should always use Shadow Dance, Symbols of Death, and Secret Technique (if talented) together. Never use Shadow Dance unless you are about to cap on charges or can combo it with Symbols of Death.

On multi-target situations, you should use Secret Technique on cooldown, due to the cooldown reduction component of the talent. Don't ever hold Secret Technique for Symbols of Death if it comes at the expense of wasting precious cooldown reduction. Instead, if you have Shadow Dance charges, combine Secret Technique with Shadow Dance everytime it comes off cooldown.

It is impossible to correctly play and optimize a Subtlety Rogue without using Raidbots to sim your own character, there are simply too many variables involved to intuitively figure out what gear to wear and so on without simming it first. Generally speaking, a simulation should be the first and final say in the gear you end up wearing for any given situation.

On top of this, simming is now very easy with no need to understand SimulationCraft APLs or installation yourself. All you will need is the in-game SimulationCraft AddOn, and the Raidbots website. Below you can find a video on how to sim your own character using the website.

When it comes to identifying and improving your mistakes, we strongly recommend the website WoWAnalyzer — it will analyze your logs and give you a report detailing how you did on the problems above and more.